Improving Website Performance

With page load speed a Google ranking factor, a lot of work is going into optimizing websites for faster loading and response. There are several variables that factor into your page load speed. Here are three of the most important and what you can do about them:

Server Performance

All things being equal, it is the performance of your server that determines how quickly your content can be served. Network connectivity is also a part of this server performance. The bandwidth available and latency are big factors in how quickly an end user will receive a page. The best way to deal with this is to use a content delivery network, which is distributed globally. These will cache your website and have adequate bandwidth to serve your customers from the closest possible location.

Image Sizes

The largest files on websites are usually images. While the above content delivery networks do cache and make images smaller, they can only go so far. Certain images that show are thumbnails are sometimes larger images just displayed smaller when they could be resized for huge savings. Audit all the images and make sure that they are only as big as they need to be. Then optimize the file size comparing different quality levels.

Page Size

While good content is important. Needlessly large pages can be problematic. Both from a readability perspective and from a page load standpoint. If you do have an article that is very long, break it up into multiple pages and link to each page separately.